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Expectations are always a crippling feeling; an invisible measuring stick against your life that curbs passions and unleashes feelings of inadequacy at every corner, felt every torso at the precipice of import age transitions. For Grace, a supremely talented singer from Blackurn, UK struggling through the whirlpool of writing sessions, gigs and meetings in London, turning 25 almost made her quit. This album, titled after that before and after moment, is a recklessly vulnerable work of beauty, a testament to just how much work and perseverance is necessarily to survive in this industry. Its toils, when filtered through emotional and melodic expression, merit wondrous attention. We sat down with this fiery and fun singer for a deep dive on the album, good curry in London, and which is the wrong side of 25:

OnesToWatch: I believe being an artist is one of the most difficult jobs on earth. So, why are you an artist? 

Grace Davies: It's a really good question, and I think there must be some sort of weird psychological thing going on to put yourself under that much stress and pressure every single day. 
There must be something wrong with me. But it's the only thing that I know how to do with all of my being, if that makes sense. It's the only thing that I've never trained for that feels correct in my life and that I learned to do without even learning to do it. 
And I just love music, I've been surrounded by performance since I was three. As someone who isn't a big talker, the thought of therapy and diaries is weird. But, being a songwriter is my vessel for that sort of stuff. So, without sounding cringey, I think being an artist is very much in my DNA. 

If your musical abilities were taken away from you, what could you imagine yourself doing right now? 

Interior design. 


Very specific. 

I love George Clark and his architectural programs. And, you know, I can appreciate a good sofa and a good wallpaper, you know? That's my other love. Either that or I would get super, super nerdy and work in Formula One in some sort of capacity. 

Oh, wow. That's very topical with the smash success of basically an hour and a half long advertising for F1. Do you have a favorite F1 driver crush? 

I was such a huge fan of Carlos and Landa when they were at McLaren together, so I feel like I'm still following both of their journeys with a close eye. Carlos always seems to have such a great teammate relationship with whoever he's put with, which I guess is a testament to him. 

Good person. How long would you say you've been writing songs with the intent to release and put them out? 

I've always weirdly had the intention of releasing, because writing is something that I didn't fall in love with… it was more of a necessity to me. I'm 28 now and I started when I was 16, because I wanted to enter a local competition that pushed artists out there and you had to audition with an original song. I didn’t have any original songs, so I figured I better learn an instrument and how to write songs. But it ended up coming so naturally to me, and even looking back at school reports from age 6, my teachers would report me being good at creative writing. Now, 12 years later, I can say that I always just wrote with the intention of wanting to be an artist, and artists need songs. 

Since you’ve been doing it for some time, do you have a process now? Where do you start a song – melody, topline, ideas, colors? 

It genuinely changes from year to year. The way that I've written this album has been very different to previous EPs, where I felt like I was maybe chasing trends, thinking about what was in the charts and trying to keep up with everyone else. Now, I’ve started to just write for me, and my younger self, based off of artists that have inspired me. What did I listen to in the car when I was eight years old that really made me get into music? 
Now, I dig back to 70s, 80s music and think, “Okay, I don’t need to write about the boys that broke my heart last week. I can write about anything and make it fun.” I used to find it hard to write about anything that wasn’t a personal experience, and now I can write outside of that, which takes away the pressure. 

Is that the biggest difference between this current version of your artistry and a prior version, that you’re not chasing trends? 

Exactly that. I feel it not only puts less pressure on me having to relive traumatic experiences constantly, but also it allows me to put myself in a mindset that I didn’t realize I could adopt. Sometimes I’ll write something thinking it’s to pitch for another artist, but then I’ll realize that’s actually my perspective. I still, obviously, diarize my own thoughts within songs, and that is a great vessel of me trying to get things out. Like I said, I don't like talking to people and the last thing I want to do is burden my friends with my thoughts and feelings. Instead, I put it into a song and force people to listen to it. But, particularly for this album, I wrote it for me, not to impress people or try to be somebody I’m not. I was like, well, if this is the first and last thing I 

Well, let’s get to the album, because it is kind of impressive. So, Grace, the hard-hitting question is, which side of 25 is the wrong side? 

We'll leave it to imagination about which side I’m on… I came up with the title on my 26th birthday and it was something that I said to my mum when she was like, “Oh, you're closer to 30 than you are 20,” and I was like, yeah, “Wrong side of 25.” I think it just stemmed from me having this sinking feeling that I'm not quite where I need to be in my mid 20s. There's a lot of things that happen when you're 25. You hit this level of “adulting,” where everyone seems to be getting their shit together, particularly from where I'm from. 
A lot of my friends were either buying houses with their partners or getting engaged or getting pregnant. And meanwhile I can barely afford to pay my rent in London because I'm paying for an album. So it's that panic, where your collagen decreases, you're in the “overs” category on the X factor and you're suddenly with Wagner. The industry also says that when you’re past 25, you’re too old to be a pop star. That’s what the album’s about, really. It’s my fear of time moving forward. There’s a song on there called “The Youngest I’ll Ever Be.” You know, you watch movies about people going back in time and changing things, like one of my favorite films, About Time, where he gets in a wardrobe, goes back in time, and reverses things he’s done. Everyone questions whether they could’ve done things differently, or better, but you can’t. I hate that. So the album is about time, and existential crises about being on the wrong side of 25, as some would say, aka me. 

Well, if you’re on the wrong side, I’m way past it. I remember when I was younger, we were having this weird conversation about ageism and life endurance and purpose. There was an old movie called Logan's Run, where society valued youth so much that you ascended into your death at age 30. Sometimes it feels like that, in these industries. 

It does feel like that. But now, it's been three years since I came up with this album, and I do feel a bit better now. So, there is hope. 

There is hope. The concept of “aging out of being a pop star” is interesting, 1) because it’s so often gendered and misogynistic toward growing women, and 2) because it presents a looming failure in front of budding artists who are just starting to reach musical maturity. Were you wrestling with any inner turmoil about powering through these roadblocks and choosing this as a career? How did you keep up the strength to persevere? 

I think I hit such a rock bottom with it that I felt there was no way to go other than to just do a 180. At the end of my last EP, in 2022, I was done, I'd already had the conversations with my manager of like, I'm going to quit. This is it for me. I've tried doing the independent artist route, and just financially and mentally, it takes such a huge toll. Particularly when you're trying to put things out to the same standards of major labels, it's really, really challenging. So I felt quite drained by all of that. I was really done. Then, I got put in a writing session that I really, really didn't want to be in. I didn't know the person that I was working with, and I was just over it a little bit. And we ended up writing “A Wonderful, Boring Normal Life” that day, which is on the album. I wrote it with Paul, who I'd never met before and he co-produced the whole album with me. I feel like that day – I don't know what happened in that session, but it very much made me realise or remember what I loved about this job. So I said, “Okay, things can’t get worse than they have been, so we either quit or do a complete 180.” It really is such a gamble, so we decided to go all in. 

I love the fatalism of that. It reminds me of people who survive crazy disaster situations where they just give up hope and then they become pragmatic. 
It's strange how our psychosis allows us to do that. “A Wonderful, Boring, Normal Life” sounds so inspiring. Within the album, is that moment representative of the time period in which the other songs were written, too? 

That one was written in November 2022, and after meeting Paul, I felt like I had found my producer. Everyone, my whole life, was telling me that one day I would just meet the producer that gets me, and I did. He was down to make an album with me, and so from March 2023 to the following year, we completed the entire thing. It was really just the two of us aside from bringing some of our favorite writers in for sessions. 

How many songs did you have to edit down to what made the album? 

Genuinely, I think there were about 30 to start, and 13 songs made it on. To me, that wasn’t a lot of songs, because on my previous EPs, when I had been speed dating writers and producers in London, I would write 250 songs a year. Those EPs, as a result, feel less like they represent me. With this album, the songs just fell out of me very naturally, and there weren’t many that weren’t great. It made the process a lot easier. I’d given myself enough time off to be really be creative and have a lot in my brain. The songs are very much about my 20s and life up until, so I do feel like they represent me. 

Shoutout to Paul for making this happen. If this album amounts to everything you’d ever want, where does it take you? 

I've never really known how to measure success. I think I always measure it in quantities of new experiences. I’ve been going after a Radio 1 play my whole career, and I genuinely thought I was blacklisted for a while. But, I got there with this album. We achieved a Spotify billboard in London. There’s results of this album that I’ve never experienced. That’s how I measure the success of the album. Of course, there’s other bucket list items like Glastonbury, but I’m grateful for the little stepping stones that get you to the next little win. 

I love that. What kind of emotion are you hoping someone to take away from listening to this album? 

I think the only thing I've ever wanted out of my music is for people to feel less alone in their feelings. You see it all the time online, “I've never had an original experience.” And it's like, there really aren't many original experiences.
But when you're in it, you can really feel very alone. And so, like I said, the stuff that I put in my songs is deep, dark shit that I'm going through and I've never spoken to anyone about, and I know there's people out there that feel the same. So if they can listen to my music and feel like I’m expressing feelings they’ve never been able to articulate or put somewhere, that’s the best thing I could get from this. 

That's beautiful. I'm going to pivot into some more fun questions. If a bunch of your good friends showed up at your place starving and you're required to whip up a meal of some sort to satiate everyone, what could you craft for them? 


I make a bangin’ salong curry. I was raised in a household that's big on curries. So I do love a good curry and I'm very good at it. That's my go-to hosting meal. 

What do you put in it? 

It's coconut based, so a block of coconut. Then, ground coriander, cumin, paprika, chili powder, garlic powder, all of the spices, garam masala. 

Well, Grace, next time you're in LA, we might need you to whip that up for us. 
That sounds amazing. What do you do for, you know, self-care? How do you relax? 
How do you give yourself some time and space? 

My parents live in the countryside with two cats, and I love going there. My parents went on holiday a couple of weeks ago and I spent the whole week looking after their cats and tending to my dad's veg patch, checking on his radishes and it was so, so mundane but so gorgeous and I just love it.
They've got a farm in the middle of nowhere and I think that's my switch off. I'm very close to my parents and I love spending time with them, but escaping London and the busyness and the music industry and being able to be at one with nature is also the appeal. Also, playing the Sims. That's good downtime. 


If you were to be able to perform anywhere, at any time, with no physical or metaphysical restrictions, do you have a dream lineup, venue, place you'd like to go? 

Royal Albert Hall is a huge one. I grew up watching my favorite artists when I was a teenager, Adele, Sam Smith, Emily Sandy, all performing there, and most recently, Raye as well, who I've been obsessed with since 2015. So I think that's always been my dream venue. For the lineup, it’s Robbie Williams is supporting me. Then it's ELO and then ABBA. 


Last question, I would love two recommendations from you. One non-music, like books or movies, and then I’d love to know your OnesToWatch, of upcoming artists. 

So there's a restaurant in London called Cricket. When people recommend Bombay Indian food in London, they always say Dishoom, but I think Cricket’s way better. 

I’ll definitely be trying it. And what about music? 

Debbii Dawson is not getting nearly enough hype, every release has been amazing. 

Any last words to end on? 

I think a lot of artists say this, but I really have put absolutely everything into this album, not just kind of mentally and physically, but financially. I keep saying I could have bought a house and I didn't, I took a gamble on making an album. And I do feel like there's a little something for everyone on there. So, yeah, if you've got 52 minutes, just give it a go. 

Thank you so much, Grace. 
Continued success.